


And I Could Easily Lose My Mind

by maplemood



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Girl!Foggy, Grief/Mourning, Post-Episode: s01e08 The Defenders, Sharing a Bed, The Defenders (Marvel TV) Spoilers, past matt/foggy implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 13:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12434016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: The story she tells herself tomorrow will be different.





	And I Could Easily Lose My Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Wacky little thing that came pretty much out of nowhere when I was supposed to be writing something else.

The story she tells herself tomorrow will be different. As in, “No, Francine, you did not let a mass-murderer cook you dinner and camp out on your couch,” and “When said mass-murderer came tapping on your window, you did not open it braless, in XL Snoopy pajama shorts. Because that would make you a real fucking slob, wouldn’t it?”

Wouldn’t it just.

“Dude. I don’t mean to be a bitch, but was the skinny blond not available?”

“Out of town.” Frank swipes at the bloody rainwater dribbling down his chin. “May I use your bathroom?”

 _May I._ That’s what gets her. Pokes into the soft spot she’s oh-so-wisely developed for him and twists in deep. Truth is, Frank could just as well force his way in. Foggy’s got a good bit of heft but no muscle underneath it; he could take her down easily.

He doesn’t. Just waits dripping on the fire escape like an especially polite burglar.

A burglar in black, blood-splattered body armor, no less.

Foggy sighs. Shuffles out of his way.

“Sure,” she tells the Punisher. “Come in out of the rain.”

+

It was Karen’s—not Karen’s idea, exactly, but her…suggestion isn’t the right word, or request, either—

“I know how you feel about him, and I know…please Foggy, please believe me; I’m not asking you to change that.”

The two of them, side-by-side on a church pew, arms linked. Foggy too empty to be surprised. Pissed, sure, but only as pissed as she could get when the other half of her brain, tamped tight down, was screaming, inconsolable: _Matty, Matty, Matty_.

She could have said about a billion things. Like, “High-stress job’s really starting to get to me; I could blow some of my vacation time in a jail cell.”

Like, “He’s going to kill you, Karen.”

Karen, whispering with her head nestled against Foggy’s shoulder. There was that note in her voice, though. It told Foggy there was no point in not agreeing.

“Frank thinks there’s more to it.”

“It’s just Frank now?” She erupted into a soggy snort. “Jesus, Karen, when—”

“We’re going to follow the trail until it runs out,” Karen told her. “I thought you should know.”

“My adrenal glands beg to differ.”

They still do. Foggy’s not entirely sure—even months later—how they got to be where they are now. How she went from being Castle’s more than a little reluctant lawyer to his—damned if she knows. They’re not friends. They’re not enemies, either, and they’re something closer than acquaintances.

She’s almost glad to have him here.

Almost.

What does that say about her?

Once she hears water running in the bathroom Foggy books it to her bedroom and jiggles into the bra and business casual getup she abandoned in favor of a tank top and Snoopy XLs. She grabs her wallet, rushes out to the shoebox of a convenience store around the corner. She’s back and unpacking drenched grocery bags at the kitchen table by the time Frank reappears.

“Didn’t need to get all that,” he rasps behind her, sudden enough to make Foggy jump. “I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”

She keeps unpacking. “Not tonight you won’t.”

Frank huffs. “Ma’am—”

“Seriously, someone out there had better start building an ark.” Foggy turns to lob a bottle of peroxide his way. Frank catches it one-handed. His lips twitch.

Fresh blood wells behind them. “Did you break off a tooth?”

He shakes his head. “Little loose, maybe.”

“Are we talking wobbling or hanging by a thread?”

This time Frank snorts. “I ain’t no goddamn beauty queen, ma’am. No need to worry about my close-up.”

“Until you end up in the papers,” Foggy says. Then sighs, combing soaked hair off her face. She needs a haircut. Badly. “What am I saying? You’re already in the papers.”

The idea of him, that is. The fear that somewhere, somehow, he’s still out there, and still killing.

In this very neighborhood, even.

Foggy shakes out the last bag. Roomed with a secretly super powered blind guy all through college and grad school; your best friend turns out to be the Punisher’s biggest advocate—why is this such a surprise to her?

“You know how to cook?” she asks.

“You don’t?”

“In this age of equality, I can as clueless in the kitchen as any man. If not more.” Foggy plops the damp box of mac and cheese onto the table. “I’m sick of takeout, though. Not that this is much better…” she shrugs. “It’s extra-extra cheesy? Gooey? We could add some pepper or bacon bits; spice things up.”

Frank shakes his head. “You don’t need me here.”

Scrubbed clean, his face looks almost worse. A swollen, purpling patchwork, thick as raw meat.

“I don’t,” Foggy agrees. “But it’s almost eight, and it’s raining. And let’s face it, you’re cold and you’re hungry and you could use the company.”

He starts back to the bathroom to collect his armor.

She calls after him. “Fine. I could use the company.”

“All right,” Frank finally says, after turning around and fixing her with a half-glare. Foggy reminds herself that it doesn’t automatically translate to “Leave everything you own and run for the hills,” at least when it’s directed at her.

“Lady, you sure know how to wear em’ down.”

Foggy can’t help it. She dimples. “I didn’t earn that shiny law degree by sitting still and looking pretty. Now get over here and help me with the macaroni.”

+

Frank boots Foggy out of her own kitchen five minutes in.

“I’ve had people tell me they burned water before,” he grumbles. “They were all full of it, but this? This shit’s a special case.”

“Maybe I needed you here after all,” Foggy suggests. Honestly, she’s happy to put her feet up. Happy to banter with someone when work’s been so much, and this apartment so lonely. Happy to see Frank forget himself, too.

“You need—I don’t know, you need your old lady to come over and kick you in the ass or something. Lisa, my ten year old? She knew her way around a stove better than this.”

Foggy almost fumbles then. Nearly drops the ball. That’s what he wants, maybe; Frank’s still looking for a way out. She should expect that, understand that, and she does, but it also sends a shot of pure fury sizzling through her gut. _No_. She’s not letting him off that easy.

“Kind of reminds me of my sister.”

“Yeah?” Whether Frank’s grateful for the bait or not, he takes it. “Didn’t know you had a sister.”

 _Tread carefully_ , mutters the voice in her head that isn’t so easily won over by basic politeness and the promise of company. Foggy leans into the depths of her sagging plaid couch. “I wasn’t ever going to draw you up a family tree, was I? But, yeah, just the one.”

“She like you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Smart.” Macaroni rattles into the sizzling water.

“Oh. Well, thanks.” Foggy feels her face pinking and prays he won’t look over. “She’s smart. Kind of a little shit sometimes, but smart.”

“They grow out of that.” Frank turns down the heat.

“She’ll be graduating from college this year. I’m not holding my breath.” Foggy heaves herself out of the couch. “You’re going to need a lid for that, right? Or--oh yeah, the colander! Let me find the colander.”

Blabbering about colanders is a safer bet than blabbering about her sister, anyway. Not that...Foggy doesn’t believe Frank will ever go after Candace. Really. It still feels wrong. Dangerous, and--almost worse--stupid.  

First Matt, then Karen, then Frank. Foggy is so, so tired of feeling stupid.

She tells him a story, though, once Frank’s facing her from the opposite end of the couch, a chipped bowl of mac and cheese cupped between his hands. It’s one of her better ones; she usually saves it for parties. Matt and Karen both loved it.

“To this day, I don’t remember how we got there. And there must have been, I don’t know, twenty different people telling us we were going to break it--they called security and everything. But we were just tipsy enough to think, hey, these kids can dance on top of the piano, why can’t we? And it wasn’t, like, graceful ballroom dancing at all. Here, I’ll show you--”

Foggy’s off the couch now, kicking up her heels. Frank smiles, a little, so she kicks them higher.

“Right? Irish step dancing on LSD. You had kids; you must’ve been to FAO Schwarz.”

Frank nods. “Fuckin’ mad house.”

“So imagine you’re in there with your little angels, and you see these two blond maniacs tearing it up on top of the piano with the five-year-olds. Horrifying, right?”

His smile’s still in place. It’s, as far as Foggy can tell, a real one. “I don’t know,” he says. “Might’ve brightened my mood.”

It warms her right down to her toes. Foggy kicks them up one last time before plopping back on the couch.

“Okay, for that you win an after-dinner beer.”

She used to be good at this. Distracting people, helping them forget themselves. After Midland Circle—with Matt gone and Karen retreating, further and further every day, into a world full of rabbit holes and trails gone cold—Foggy thought the knack had left her. Seems like it’s come back now. If only for one night.

+

Neither of them mentions Matt until well after the beer, when all Foggy’s jokes and Frank’s half-grudging smiles have been exhausted. She doesn’t want the nitty-gritty details of whatever he and Karen have been investigating, let alone what Karen’s doing for him in return. She just needs to know that her friend is safe.

“She’s a grown woman,” Frank points out. “She can take care of herself.”

As if he isn’t skipping over rooftops to make sure Karen makes it home safe every night—and as if Karen and Foggy aren’t both completely aware of this. Foggy snorts.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t worry. The way she’s going after him—it’s not normal. She’s losing herself.”

“And you’re not.”

She flicks her bottle cap across the room.

 “That’s pretty goddamn rich,” Foggy says. “Coming from you.”

It takes her a second to think, _Shit_.

Then, _Beer’s kicking in a little more than you planned_.

“Shit,” she says out loud. “God, Frank, I’m—”

Is she?

His glare’s real this time, mottled by bruises and hardened by a jaw set too tight. Even so, he doesn’t look dangerous.

Foggy preferred it when he did.

“Ma’am,” Frank says, his tone making it very clear that the formality is just that, “I didn’t ask to stay here.”

Her own scowl pulls tighter. “So leave.”

Silence stretches between them, down to the snapping point. It would, anyway, if the rain weren’t pissing down outside. Rattling her windows like a handful of pebbles.

Thunder breaks overhead. Impossibly loud.

“Goddammit,” Frank mutters.

He won’t leave, no more than she would let him leave.

Foggy scoops the empty bottle out of his hands and hauls off the couch. Resists the suddenly strong urge to smash both bottles in the sink. When did shindigs with this guy become an option? Is she really that pathetic—that lonely?

“Okay, I’m off,” she says, too brisk, as she dumps the bottles in the trash. “You take the couch—there’s sheets in the closet.”

Foggy hears a clatter. When she turns around Frank’s rinsing their crusty bowls under the tap.

 _Leave them_ , she thinks about snapping—but he’s already reaching for the dish cloth. So Foggy almost snorts, because there’s something so painfully, stupidly funny about this whole setup. Frank’s still mad (she can tell from the tightness in his shoulders, and the way he buffs at those bowls just a shade too industriously) but dammit if he’s not going to do the dishes like some good-old-boy-turned-gentleman. They’re living in one of those artsy, one-act plays. Two miserable people, a crummy set, and not much else.

Except maybe a ghostly projection of Matt. That wouldn’t be out of place.

Foggy scrubs her hands over her face.

“Look,” she says, “I know better than anyone that Matt wouldn’t die easy. He’s like you that way.”

The only response she gets to that half-assed attempt at flattery is a grunt.

“But I can’t…I can’t hope for the impossible anymore, Frank. I can’t take that chance.”

“So.” He flicks the dish cloth over his shoulder. “Begs the question—why do you keep letting me in?”

+

Foggy goes to bed. She doesn’t sleep. Frank doesn’t, either, on the other side of her paper-plate wall. Foggy hears him, shifting and trying not to shift; she knows he hears her doing the same. She’s never had anyone overnight in this apartment, not even Marci or Matt. She’s not used to this.

The couch creaks again. Is a spring poking him in the back or something?

Should she go check?

No. Jesus. Go to sleep.

Instead, Foggy remembers Matt. Like she does every night, the memories wearing down to balls of fuzz, a soft background static.

College. The very last day of their freshman spring semester. Marci was gone. Marci was always gone, so Foggy invited Matt in and they stayed up almost all night, high on post-finals jitters. He could look so _stern_ sometimes, so knotted up and bottled deep within himself, but that night they were both laughing like crazy and probably a little drunk, though she doesn’t remember if they actually drank anything. Being around each other was enough.

The corners of his eyes crinkled whenever he smiled. Foggy wanted to smooth them out.

She woke up, her mouth cottony and sour, to Matt’s head pillowed against her side, and now Foggy remembers—almost dreams—her thoughts when she rolled over, warm and syrup-slow, to nudge him awake.

“Hey, Matt. Mattie.”

 _This is it_ , she thought. _This is the best friend I’ll ever have._

That stands out, clear and sharp where the rest of the memory is rubbed down to a smear. It cuts, pulls Foggy into her imagination, into all the images of Matt crushed beneath the rubble, raking in breaths until he can’t and dying a mess of broken, gritting bone....

She doesn’t think about that.

She can’t.

It’s…god, is it three? Four? Too goddamn early is what it is. Somehow she’s up again, out of bed and stumbling through to the kitchen. For a glass of water, Foggy thinks, when that’s not right at all, it’s that, just—

“Frank?”

She didn’t hear him moving around anymore. Thought maybe he’d slipped out, but there he is, by the window. Foggy’s dinky little side table lamp switched on to give him some light. Lamp or no lamp, for a second she thinks he’s sleepwalking. He stands that still. Silent.

“You shouldn’t’ve gotten up.”

Okay. Not anymore. Foggy pads closer, sees that his T-shirt’s crumpled from tossing and turning, like a little boy’s. The back of his neck’s flushed, imprinted by one of her floppy couch pillows. Maybe she’s halfway in a dream, because inside Foggy twists, tight, around an almost unbearable tenderness. Without thinking, she slides in beside him, then reaches out to brush his jaw with her fingertips, lightly. Turns his face toward hers (God only knows why, but he lets her) just as lightly.

“Oh, Frank.”

She knows that face. She’s seen it in the mirror every day after Matt didn’t come walking through that door. It’s not that she’s never thought of Frank’s pain before, of his wife and babies gunned to meat in front of him. Of course she has, she was his lawyer—one of his lawyers—but now? Now it rocks her like a punch to the gut.

His stubble rasps against her fingertips. “They were so small,” is all Frank says.

So small, bloody and raw, like cuts of meat. Like Matt, unrecognizable, and Foggy was lucky enough not to see that part, to only have to imagine it, but.

Death is death. Pain is pain, no matter how it’s portioned out.

Foggy swallows.

“Frank,” she repeats.

He looks down at her, eyes black holes, swirled with bruises.

“Come on to bed.”

+

This is…well, it’s so far off the reservation of good decisions that Foggy’s zipped through the wilderness and right off earth and is probably merrily shooting through the stratosphere at this very moment.

He can become Frank Castle for the night. He can cook and make good conversation and cover up the hating if not the hurt. Foggy can see him as just Frank Castle. But he’s not.

He’s _not_.

+

The Punisher hesitates, a shadow at the foot of her bed; any other time and this would be a nightmare. It does feel at least halfway to a dream.

Foggy punches down her pillow. “Hey,” she whispers, over the better half of her brain and over the rain still rattling her windows. “I don’t bite.”

She doesn’t know if those words in particular clinch it or if he’s too tired to care either way. Something drops off Frank, unraveling to the floor, and he gives this weary shrug, almost shivering, and he climbs into Foggy’s bed and doesn’t say a word when she pulls the covers over him.

Her mattress creaks. Dips a little in the middle.

“Ma’am—” he begins, his voice throaty. A catch in it, buried deep, cuts her. Cuts them both. 

Foggy reaches toward him. “Come here.”

A billion other stupid little fears race through her head like blips down the wire—whether she remembered to brush her teeth or not, her sagging boobs and sagging gut; shit, when did she last change these sheets—they don't matter now, none of them. Her fears are nothing.  Because Frank buries his face against her, and wraps his arms around her, squeezing hard, painfully hard, in a way that has nothing to do with tenderness and everything to do with finding comfort. A sound racks out of him, bone-dry; it shudders through Foggy while she strokes his back and his poor battered head and whispers to him like she used to whisper to her sister, to her baby cousins, to Matt, once upon a time.

“Baby,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

Baby. Sugar. Sweetheart.

Mattie.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, knowing he’s gone forever, most likely. He’s not the one she’s holding in her arms right now, and it’s Foggy who begins to cry, as quietly as she can, which isn’t quietly at all. Sloppy. Tears and snot smearing everywhere.

Frank’s fingers cup over the base of her skull. He pulls away a little, steadier now, and guides Foggy’s head down to rest in the curve of his shoulder.

“I keep remembering him,” she mumbles against his skin. “I can’t take it anymore. I _can’t_.”

Her words fall on him, wet and frantic, and Frank answers or he doesn’t. Foggy isn’t sure. All she knows is that they’re pressed together again, hard, desperate, arms tangling. And they’re both trying, as hard as they’ve ever tried anything, not to remember.

They stay this way, bound together, until sleep pulls them apart.

+

Foggy wakes up too early and too slowly. Rolls over to see him sitting on the side of her bed. She memorizes the curve of his shoulders, the slump of his back.

The rain’s stopped. Light’s barely started to break, dog-piss watery.

“You awake?” Frank asks, turning. His profile’s bruised, murky, soft with sleep.

Foggy rubs the sleep crust out of her lashes. “Barely.”

“Uh-uh. It’s barely morning.”

“You’re leaving.”

He turns away. “I got work to do.”

She realizes that she doesn’t want him to stay. This can’t last, shouldn’t last; it’s all right. She’ll remember the parts she needs to, sharp, even when the rest wears down to a blur.

Foggy sits up. “If you ever need a place to crash again—” she fiddles with the hem of the Snoopy shorts. “Look, I’m not making any promises, but just try me out, okay? You might catch me in a good mood again.”

“Mmm.” He creaks to his feet. “I’m not betting on luck.”

“Suit yourself.”

So it’s done. Foggy takes a deep breath, not knowing what to say and not thinking there’s anything she can say, but she has to at least try. Scrabble for some closure.

Isn’t that what they’re all looking for, though? Her, Karen, Frank. Matt before the end. Foggy’s beginning to think there’s no such thing. Not in this life.

And then Frank turns, and he cups the back of her head again, so delicately that something in Foggy stops, and something else twists, and all she feels, for a second—a split-second—is the press of his fingers there, and the rustle of her hair against them.

He presses his lips to her forehead.

“Thank you,” he says before he goes. Foggy understands that he’s not talking about what happened in this bed. That’s something closed-off now, held between them. “You helped me forget.”

With mac-and-cheese and beer and stupid dances. One night, for all that’s worth.

+

Her bed doesn’t crop up in the story Foggy tells herself. Not once.

+

“Frank.” And the imprint of his lips is still there, still warm, and Foggy wants to reach for him again, badly—maybe he wants to reach for her, too, but what does it matter? They’re both so caught up in wanting what they can’t have.

“You helped me forget, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I doubt Frank will help Karen track down Matt in _The Punisher_ , but it's fun to think about. Title from "Georgia" by Vance Joy, which really captures the mood I was going for in the fic.
> 
> FAO Schwarz is a _massive_ toy store in NYC. [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOdB-0biTlM) is the piano from Foggy's story.


End file.
